Do you like to customize your operating system’s look and feel? Do words like “sleek”, “minimalistic”, and “metallic” turn you on? If so then read on: 7Conifier (pronounced “iconifier”) is a free tool that can customize your Windows 7 taskbar and start menu icons by replacing them with any of a number of sleek-looking icon libraries (notably the Token Icon set found on DeviantArt).
7Conifier comes with 3 pre-installed icon libraries, but you could easily add your own or even extend the existing icon libraries to include icons for programs that they might have missed. It also gives you the option to easily revert back to the original icons at any point.
If you’ve read this far then I am assuming that your like the “before and after” image posted above. One more thing to note: you can switch the icons for the taskbar, the start menu, either or both.
Here’s a list of PROS and CONS that pertain to this program:
PROS:
- Works well: icons switched within seconds.
- Offers 3 icon sets to choose from: Token light, Token dark and Eclispe2 (get a glimpse of these in the sidebar of the screenshot to the right).
- Icon libraries include a wide range of common programs: but will no doubt miss a few of the programs that you have on your machine. If so, you could easily customize the existing icons to cover these or add new ones (see below).
- Icon libraries editable: in the sense that you could easily assign an icon to any executable, add or remove icons to any of the icon sets (note that you would, of course, have to somehow come up with or create the new icons using external tools).
- Revert to default icons: 7Conifier can do this in one of two ways; it will save your default icons when it starts allowing you to go back to these at any point, or it can force Explorer to re-load the icons from the files themselves.
CONS
- MS Office: my Office 2007 icons didn’t switch over at first, until I removed them and dragged the executables back to the taskbar and re-applied, and that somehow made a difference.
- The range of apps could have been bigger: because you will probably be surprised that many common ones are missing (e.g. The KMPlayer, Dropbox).
The verdict: if you like this sort of visual tweaking of your OS, you will like 7Conifier. Although still in beta this is a well made program that does exactly what it sets out to do.
Version Tested: 0.4 R3 BETA
Compatibility: Windows 7.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 2.2 megs).
